Autumn Cottage Diarist:

I sat last evening in the cool of the summerhouse, looking out on the pond, a glass of wine in my hand, the light filtering through the trees, birdsong abounding…everything still; particularly myself, unable to move after three days rather 'over-doing it' in the garden! It was blissful - physical incapacity (of a very temporary kind) insisting that just for a half hour or so, I stopped to enjoy all that exists and is also in the process of being created here.

As gardeners, we do this so often, don't we? Particularly after this year's horrible winter and cold wetness of the spring, we see the need to 'get on with it' and spend all hours of the day (and half the night if I have my way) doing all the jobs that need doing. But we miss the most important thing of all. The thing that I am oh, so good at telling others to do - to just stop…for a while…and enjoy. And listen. And notice. I'm not so good at doing it myself!

When I'm pottering around the pond, I take in the pleasures of the birdsong - Blackbird, Thrush and Robin all inhabit the air with their fluting melodies at the moment. But I must admit that I also enjoy sitting inside the summerhouse, listening to Classic FM on the radio, while I write my Summerhouse Journal - which I leave there, for others to also write their thoughts.

I've also got a pile of gardening magazines and a few books (not many - they get damp); Alan Tichmarsh's 'My Secret Garden' and Thomasina Tarling's 'Truly Tiny Gardens' are there for my current browsing. Indoors, I often pull out John Weather's 1924 tome 'My Garden Book' - filled with early colour plates of blowsy old Edwardian gardens, stuffed full of plants and colour. (You can see a couple, above and below). I've got a big library of gardening books, never ceasing to be inspired by their photographs, more than the texts. Most of my gardening books are 'picture books' (I have a very visual learning style) with a few very good technical information tomes (and trusty Google always nowadays at the fingertips!).

I do also have several garden writers anthologies, which also inspire with their enthusiastic prose; the best garden writers always helping me to imagine that I am standing in a garden right alongside them - or that I CAN, indeed, cope with the eradication of Triffid like weedy landscapes stretching as far as my histrionic eye has convinced me to see!

Poetry elevates my pleasure to yet another level - the delight of hearing someone put into words (that you cannot yourself find) the transcendent experience, the balm to the soul, the assurance to fears of whatever 'Hereafter' there may or may not be - the poet is able to capture these thoughts, wrap them in ink and paper and present them back to me so that I may say - ah, yes…that is *exactly* what it is like. To share the pleasure (as other poems help one to share the pain) of knowing that someone else really 'gets' the emotions that you may be feeling.

As for particular garden poems…you may be familiar with Kipling's Edwardian 'Glory of the Garden' - but have you ever read the whole thing? Until just a few years ago, I did not KNOW that there was 'a whole thing' other than the fifth, most quoted verse - but when I did discover that there was more, it touched me with a truth and profundity that I felt deeply. My great grandfather was a gardener - a little earlier than the time that Kipling wrote 'The Glory…' (1911) - but I like to think that when he wrote it, Kipling was thinking of people like Thomas Latham and his hard-working ilk. Certainly, though technology and internet searches make life easy for our gardening hands of the 21st century, still the beauty and the glory of the gardens of the whole of the UK remains a many splendoured joy.

The gardeners of Quex Park

The Glory of the Garden

OUR England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You'll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dung-pits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts, and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise ;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows ;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:-" Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.

There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner In the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!